1953

Reviewed by David McCooey

AS TELEVISION shows such as The Hour and Call the Midwife suggest, the 1950s continue to undergo a resurgence in popular culture. In Geoff Page's 1953 we see that period's rehabilitation in a poetic idiom. The book represents the fictional country town of Eurandangee through the monologues and verse portraits of its inhabitants. These include a GP, a police officer, a real estate agent, a miner and - with less to occupy them - various housewives, children and indigenous inhabitants.

That these portraits are described on the book's back cover as forming a ''uniquely horizontal narrative'' illustrates the continued (if putative) marketing power of the verse novel in Australian publishing almost 20 years after the success of Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask.

Publishers need a sales pitch, of course, but I can't help feeling that 1953 is more ''horizontal'' than ''narrative''. While there are some interconnections between the portraits, no large, coherent narrative appears. Each portrait is more or less self-contained, forming a composite, and largely static, image of Eurandangee and, by implication, Australia in the 1950s.

Emphasising the narrative over the lyric mode is not something that UQP, the book's publisher, has engaged in randomly, however. The setting of the portraits at the same time on the same day - 2.30pm, February 17 - inevitably and immediately produces a sense of narrative suspense. What sensational event will puncture the day's small-town calm? But this tension is not played out until the last poem, the events of which are not prefigured in any of the earlier poems, giving this final poem the sense that it is there merely to ''account'' for the suspense produced by synchronous narration.

While 1953 might seem novel (so to speak) in the Australian context, the portrait of a fictional small town through simultaneous micro-narratives has a surprisingly long cultural history, especially in the US. Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), Thornton Wilder's play Our Town (1938) and Daniel Clowes' graphic novel Ice Haven (2005) illustrate the long-standing attractiveness of producing such heterocosms.

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Interestingly, all three of those works illustrate an uneasy relationship between realism and fantasy. 1953, on the other hand, appears to work largely in a realist mode, relying on realist themes such as gender, work and racial difference. Through such themes, Page presents an interesting account of an Australian modernity finely poised between that of our time and that of the ''mythic'' 1890s, during which the construction of Australian identity as white, male and anti-authoritarian allegedly occurred.

Page has long been attracted to the Australian small town, characteristically presenting his milieu in a notably ''balanced'' way. Neither Wake in Fright nor A Country Practice, 1953 seems to avoid both the gothicism and idealisation the small-town setting habitually attracts in Australian literature. Similarly, Page's aesthetic is one in which plain-spokenness is enlivened by occasional shafts of lyrical intensity.

In this balanced manner, Page makes numerous references to the historical background of his setting: men suffering from trauma after three wars; women stifled by the gender politics of the day; and indigenous people inhabiting the ''fringes'' of white society. He offers few startling insights concerning these issues, being at his most interesting when concerned with the sociological subtleties of his milieu. These subtleties are often linguistic, as when Sister Brigid says to a fellow nun: ''What sins have you for me, my child?''

The sins of the citizens of Eurandangee are never heinous. Even the indigenous population and the traumatised returned servicemen sound relatively sanguine (to use an ironic word for those cohorts). Notwithstanding its violent ending and its attention to ''difficult'' subjects, this collection offers a portrait of small-town Australia unwilling to deeply engage in the darker elements of its subject.

In this respect, Page's portrait of Eurandangee begins to look a lot like that ancient poetic form, the pastoral. Australia has long preferred to emphasise its pastoral history, perhaps because the pastoral, as a literary form, can never quite shake the convention of idealising its subject matter.

■ David McCooey's latest collection of poems, Outside, was a finalist in the Melbourne Prize for Literature's best writing award in 2012.